Severe congenital heart disease speeds comorbidity onset

Researchers tracked 9,764 individuals with severe congenital heart disease and 127,728 with nonsevere disease in a Quebec cohort over 35 years to map 38 comorbidities. Patients with severe disease developed conditions substantially earlier across life. By age 40, their cumulative probabilities of developing cardiac, vascular, endocrine, metabolic, digestive, infectious, renal, and neurological diseases were at least twofold higher than in nonsevere cases. Most comorbidities had a median onset before age 40 in severe disease, arriving two to three decades earlier than in nonsevere patients, whose peaks occurred between their 60s and 80s. In severe congenital heart disease, disease progression typically began with childhood cardiovascular conditions, shifted to metabolic, hepatic, and renal diseases in early adulthood, and culminated in heart failure and dementia.